Almost Everyone Underestimates Donizetti

Almost Everyone Underestimates Donizetti

By Warren Boroson

Franz Schubert and Gaetano Donizetti had a good deal in common—even though the first is famous for his symphonies, the second for his operas.

   To begin, both were born in 1797. Second, they were geniuses at creating magnificent melodies. Here’s an example of a memorable aria in Donizetti’s opera, “Lucrezia Borgia”:

Il segreto per esser felici, Sigrid Onegin,1928 & 1921

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLmAeAngxWI

            Then too, as composers they were overshadowed by one of their contemporaries: Beethoven in Schubert’s case, Rossini (and perhaps Bellini) in Donozetti’s case.  

          Both composers were marvelously prolific. Schubert wrote so much music of  different kinds that I recently heard a Schubert scholar say that he was “unclassifiable.”  As for Donizetti, the better-known of his 70 or so operas include “Anna Bolena,” “L’Elisir,” “Lucrezia Borgia,” “Maria Stuarda,” “Lucia de Lammermoor” (perhaps his best), “Roberto Devereux,” “Daughter of the Regiment,” “La Favorite,” and “Don Pasquale.” He also wrote church music, string quartets, and orchestral pieces. Oh, and 16 symphonies, 19 string quartets, 193 songs, 45 duets, 3 oratorios, 28 cantatas, instrumental concertos, sonatas, and other chamber pieces. Once, told that Rossini had written an opera in a mere two weeks, Donizetti said, well, he was always lazy.

    One possible reason both men were so prolific: Both were ill and perhaps were racing against time to record their music.

     Their chief illness, as it happens, was the same. Syphilis.

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     Among great composers Donizetti has been shamefully neglected. During his time, and for many years thereafter, he was looked down upon because he was so prolific. The composer Hector Berlioz even lambasted him because his operas dominated the opera houses of Paris. (He wrote about Donizetti: “… [he] is a tall, handsome young man, but cold and without a shred of talent….”)

    Even Donizetti’s father, a workingman, was dubious about his son, telling him, “It is impossible that you will ever compose, that you will go to Naples, that you will go to Vienna.” Gaetano did compose, he went to Naples, he went to Vienna, he even went to Paris.

Another reason Donizetti is neglected, I believe, is that his life was so tragic. And the media, understandably, would rather not remind people of what a miserable life Donizetti led by writing about him. His three children died soon after birth. His wife died at 28. He himself went stark raving mad. Various opera singers came to visit him late in his life, and sang his lovely arias to him. He usually showed absolutely no recognition. Though at one point he went over to a piano and tried to play—but his fingers were too gnarled.

    There’s also the myth that Donizetti wrote only a few good operas—“Lucia” and “Daughter of the Regiment.” Actually, his lesser-known operas seem always to be rediscovered and revived. The author of a superb biography of Donizetti, William Ashbrook, who taught at Indiana University, believes that the composer’s best opera may be “Don Sebastien,” which hardly anyone knows.

            My own favorite aria by Donizetti is from the last act of “Lucia,” here sung by the Irish tenor John McCormack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYqlXXcDn78&list=PLFE635AC47151E30D

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Donizetti lived from to 1797 to 1848. It was the era of Rossini and Bellini, and while Donizetti was an admirer of his two rivals, Bellini was positively paranoid about Donizetti.

     The musical scene in the early 19th century was very different.

     It was the heyday of “bel canto”: florid singing, lots of very high notes, lots of ornaments.

   There were no operas played year after year—there was no “repertory.” When an opera opened, it might never be performed again. So it had to be immediately successful for the composer to make money. Things changed with Rossini, whose operas were so popular that they WERE revived, launching a true repertory.

    Musical pirates abounded.  They would copy the opera scores, then  put on the operas themselves—without paying the composer anything. Two musicians in Donizetti orchestra were caught copying the scores.

    Composers were generally looked down on. Famous singers, like Pasta and Rubini, were paid maybe ten times more, and they felt they were even entitled to alter the score. Some singers interpolated arias written by other composers into the operas they were singing!

   Even so, opera was a key part of life in 19th-century Italy and France—and Donizetti might be carried back to his hotel by grateful opera-goers after a popular new opera of his, and the singers, chorus, and orchestra might serenade him under his window. But if the audience didn’t like an opera, or part of an opera, they would WHISTLE. Berlioz, the French composer, penned nasty reviews of Donizetti operas. So Donizetti wrote about Berlioz that audiences were always whistling at his music—which is why, Donizetti wrote, he could understood why he was so critical of Donizetti’s own ever-popular music.

In those days, illness delayed many an opera. No one knew why illnesses were a c constant threat. Singers from all over the world came together to perform, and naturally they exchanged germs—which people knew nothing about. (Daniel Defoe, author of “A Journal of the Plague Year,” thought it absurd that some people actually thought that invisible creatures caused disease. Today we know them as bacteria and viruses.)

 It was a time when sometimes an opera wasn’t well attended simply because so many people had left for the country because of fear of contracting cholera.

A time when censorshp was so strict (in Italy, especially) that royalty had always to be treated with profound respect. Ashbrook writes: The Neopolitan censors of the 1820s and 1830s wanted to protect royal sensibilities and suppress plots dealing with conspiracies or religious characters. “They sincerely believed that plots should be morally uplifting, and that the depiction of violence on stage was detrimental to the public welfare.” The censors also preferred happy endings, now called Hollywood endings; “…[they believed they affirmed the status quo….”

    The first performance of Donzetti’s opera, “Maria Stuarda,” was actually cancelled because of its use of the word “bastardo”—Mary, Queen of Scots called Elizabeth that because Elizabeth was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, whom Henry XIII had divorced. Lucrezia Borgia ran into trouble because Lucrezia was related to some important people, including a pope. It was because of this wacko censorship that Donizetti began writing for French opera houses, disillusioned as he was by Italian opera houses.

   Another example of silly censorship: He wrote an opera, “Maria Padilla,” for La Scala, an opera in which the heroine commits suicide. The censors wanted the ending changed. Suicide, they had decided, “was not an edifying spectacle and that the herone should…die of joy! “ Donizetti was disgusted but  he had to go along.

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Why did Donizetti have such an unfortunate life? Syphilis or the pox. It  was considered shameful ever since it debuted in the late 15th century—until 1943, when doctors began treating it with penicillin. Its progress could be slowed but the disease was never cured. Mercury or quicksilver was considered the best treatment—even though it had nasty side-effects.

There are three stages of syphilis. The first stage: lesions. The second stage: pain, severe depression. The final stage: headaches, changes of mood, usually concluding with paralysis, dementia, rages.

Some victims of sylphis waste away gradually, like Frederick Delius; some die quickly, before the onset of insanity, like Franz Schubert. And some go insane, like Nietzsche, Schumann, Hugo Wolf, and…Donizetti.

 The people with syphilis who died before they went insane were fortunate. “Franz Schubert was one of the lucky ones,” a music scholar has written. He died at only 31.               

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Donizetti was born in Bergamo, a province of Lombardy. He came from a poor family; they lived in a basement apartment with no windows. His father discouraged him from being a composer,  telling him, “It is impossible that you will ever compose, that you will go to Naples, that you will go to Vienna.” Gaetano did compose, he went to Naples, he went to Vienna, he went to Paris.

     As a youth he was fortunate to have acquired a gifted music teacher, Simon Mayr, who took him under his wing and helped him for the remainder of his life.

He had written 30 operas before one of his them met with success: “Anna Bolena.” One reason: It had a very good libretto. Here’s what he wrote to his wife after the sensational opening of “Anna Bolena”: “I am pleased to announce to you that the new opera by your beloved and famous husband has had a reception that could not possibly be improved on.

 “Success, triumph, delirium; it seemed that the public had gone mad. Everyone says that they cannot remember ever having been present at such a triumph.

            “I was so happy that I started to weep, just think! And my heart turned toward you, and I thought of your joy had you been present….

          “Even though I had faith in a favorable reception…I was suspended between heaven and hell during the first quarter hour …. Now I am in heaven and I cannot express my happiness to you. I lack only a kiss from my Virginia, which I shall come to collect at the first opportunity…..”

As a young man, growing up in Italy, he had developed syphilis—before his marriage to Virginia. They had three infants, none of whom lived.  Ashbrook writes that a “regrettable conclusion seems unavoidable: that Gaetano infected Virginia, as her difficult pregnancy and the premature birth of their deformed child who lived not two weeks would seem to bear out. Tragic as these circumstances were, it is only fair to point out that because Donizetti suffered from syphilis he was not necessarily any more of a libertine than a man of his time, his disposition, his profession, his opportunities might be expected to be.”

He fell madly in love with his future wife, Virginia, writing about her: “She is the daughter of excellent parents, educated as a lady, one who without making an issue of it knows how to adapt herself to every situation, one who has never got herself talked about, one who respects me and loves me both when I am far and near.”

Donizetti thought she had died of measles. Ashbrook writes: “Distasteful as the suggestion may seem, it is difficult to rule out the possibility … in the face of what evidence survives, that instead of measles she succumbed to severe syphilitis infection.”

       Donizetti was grieved by her death. He remained in bed for several days, unable to rise. From then on he didn’t want anyone to mention that he was a widower. He would never speak or write Virginia’s name again. He closed the door to her bedroom and never reopened it.

Later in life, he became more and more demented. He would stop in midsentence, having lost track of his thought, and just stare,  He might explode in a rage. Eventually he had trouble just holding up his head. He had delusions, insisting that he had been poisoned. “He would drink a bowl of soup,” someone wrote, “which he lapped up like an animal.” His friends and relatives tried to keep Donizetti’s dementia a secret, but word got out. Famous singers came to sing his music to him, but he was usually unresponsive. Even Verdi, much influenced by Donizetti’s music, paid him a visit.

      Ashbrook sums up his take on Donizetti: “[He] emerges from the cumulative evidence of his time as an admirable person, in some ways even noble, and in all ways intensely human.”

     After he died, he was buried where he had been born, in Bergamo, in front of a Donizetti monument.

       There’s a Donizetti Society today, and not surprisingly the Society has doubts that he ever suffered from syphilis.

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Joseph Schmidt, “Una furtiva lagrima”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD-yzw7ExY4

Caruso, Galli-Curci, et al. in the Sextet from “Lucia”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14tdvxUvxFU

Joan Sutherland, Mad Scene, “Lucia”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3_8wz_xNI0